Sunday, January 31, 2010

The Press Club II

Last night Greg & I went to The Press Club for a belated anniversary date. We decided to go there since I had enjoyed the lunch that I had there so much & Greg was keen to go after hearing me raving about it. Since we were having an expensive meal anyway we decided to go for the degustation menu. I love a good degustation menu, I think because I decide what we eat every night I love that someone just brings me lots of food & I don't have to think about what I want to eat.

To start with, we were given complimentary pickled vegetables, Dench olive bread & Dench sourdough bread (not pictured). The olive bread is so good & the breads were served with kalamata olive oil & organic black salt. Greg says that I always use too much salt but he even loved the black salt.

Our first course was 3 salads, they were a dried tomato salad, a skewer with watermelon & roasted capsicum & olive bread salad - all deliciousness. The dried tomato salad was particularly good - it was really intensely flavoured & I loved it. Although at this point Greg was concerned that he was going to be hungry which he really should not have been worried about. It is a terrible photo, but you get the general idea.

Next course was supposed to be "fish and chips", they normally serve chips with taramasalata, but for us they did chips & hommous with olive oil couscous. The olive oil couscous is olive oil that has been frozen in liquid nitrogen so it looks super impressive when it is served up & also looks like couscous, but melts into delicious liquid olive oil on the hommous. Our lovely waitress instructed us to dip the chips into hommous & eat which we did & it was really, really good. The chips were quite possibly the best chips ever.

Next up was pasta with lemon, olive oil & fresh herbs with shaved Tasmanian truffles - simple & ridiculously good, although by this stage I was getting pretty full!

Then came out baby vegetables with celery gel, crumbled carrot cake & sunflower seeds. Again it was another course of deliciousness. I am not sure but I think there are purple carrots in there which were my favourite.

Then came dessert & I was really, really full but could not say no when presented with vanilla rice pudding with candied walnuts - I would like to eat this every day it was so good!

At this stage I was really hoping that the meal was over because I had eaten way too much, but we were then presented with our final course - poached pear with orange gel & pistachio praline with blackberry sorbet on crumbled pistachios. The blackberry sorbet was amazing!! I am not a huge fan of sorbets but this was incredible!

It is certainly not a cheap meal at $125 each, but we were there for 3 hours, had amazing food with impeccable presentation & fantastic service - I think it is great for a special occassion. And I am still full this morning!

No - not including booze!! $125 each just for the meals. You could get matched wines but then I think it was over $200 each & would have been no good for me since I am not drinking. The pasta was really, really good.